The film writing of Saadat Hasan Manto

Just recently I've been reading some of the film writing of the Saadat Hasan Manto, portraits of the great players and characters of the Hindi film world in the 1930s and 40s put together in a book called Stars From Another Sky, in an English translation by Khalid Hasan. Manto is by consensus the greatest Urdu writer of the twentieth century, so there is no real need to make a case for how good his work is - that is already known. But sometimes, when his name crops up in discussions with friends, or on the rare occasions when it appears in some context in the memory-less Indian press, I get the sense that the side of Manto that is generally remembered today is the Manto of the post-Partition years.

This is the angry, bitter, traumatised Manto who, having left Bombay for Pakistan early in 1948, wrote from Lahore arresting fables of the ravages and ruptures of Partition such as "Toba Tek Singh", the Manto who was capable of compressing the horror and the inhumanity of what he saw into stories sometimes no more than two lines long. (Here is one called "Resting Time": "He is not dead, there is still some life in him." "I can't. I am really exhausted.")

But there is another Manto, the Manto who came to the city of Bombay from his native Amritsar in 1936 at the age of 24, and who over the next twelve years, working as a scriptwriter in the Hindi film industry, became the poet of the charms of chawl life, of joblessness, gossip and drink, of rags-to-riches stories, of sudden affections and bitter partings, of vagabonds and prostitutes, of the sights and sounds of the big city, all of which he recorded with great affection and sly humour. This is the Manto I like best, and this side of him is often seen in its most vivid form not in his stories but in his non-fiction pieces about the film stars, directors, lyricists, and playback singers of his times, most of whom he knew very well through his work.

Here are Manto's pitch-perfect first three paragraphs from his essay on Ashok Kumar, which pitchfork us all at once into a world of frenzied passions and hectic disorder:

When Najmul Hasan ran off with Devika Rani, the entire Bombay Talkies was in turmoil. The film they were making had gone on the floor and some scenes had already been shot. However, Najmul Hasan had decided to pull way the leading lady from the celluloid world to the real one. The worst affected and the most worried man at Bombay Talkies was Himanshu Rai, Devika Rani's husband and the heart and soul of the company.

S.Mukerjee, Ashok Kumar's brother-in-law, who was to make several hit movies in the years to come, was at the time sound engineer Savak Vacha's assistant. Being a fellow Bengali, he felt sorry for Himanshu Rai and wanted to do something to make Devika Rani return. Without saying anything to Rai, he somehow managed to persuade her to come back, which meant that he talked her into abandoning the warm bed of her lover Najmul Hasan in Calcutta and return to Bombay Talkies where her talents had a greater chance of flourishing.

After Devika Rani came back, Mukerjee convinced the still shaken Himanshu Rai to accept his runaway wife. As for Najmul Hasan, he was left to join the ranks of those who are fated to be deserted by their beloveds for less emotional, but weightier political, religious or simply material considerations. As for the scenes he had already done, they were trashed. The question now was: who was going to be his replacement?

It is opening worthy of a great story or novel: so many things rush by so quickly, but by the end of it all we not only feel like we have a grip on all the action, but also on the natures of the three people implicated in it. Notice how sly Manto's comedy is. Logically the first sentence should have been, "When Najmul Hasan ran off with Devika Rani, her husband Himanshu Rai was in turmoil," and only later should Manto have spoken of how a film that was already on the floor was now ruined. But instead he makes us believe for a moment that the loss to Bombay Talkies is the most important consequence of Devika Rani's flight, and only tells us about her hapless husband in the last paragraph. And lest we think that he is being unnecessarily cruel towards Rai, Manto balances things out in the next two paragraphs. One pokes fun at Devika Rani in the juxtaposition of boudoir and film set (the latter being the place "…where her talents had greater chance of flourishing"), while the next pours cold water over poor Najmul Hasan, who had appeared in paragraph one a dashing hero.

And yet there is also something poignant about these paragraphs. That something is not to be found in the writing itself, which is too assured to reveal it, but we feel it when we find out that Manto wrote this piece and the pieces alongside it for a Pakistani film magazine in Lahore in 1950. He was out of work in the new world to which he had migrated, and pining for the Bombay that had supported not just his material life but also nourished his imagination and his powers of moral discernment for the best part of his adult life. Manto was never to return. His condition grew steadily worse in Pakistan, he was almost always out of work and had a family of four to support, he was prosecuted by the state on charges of obscenity for his story "Thanda Gosht", he took to drink, and finally died tragically early in 1955. These long journalistic pieces - about Ashok Kumar, Nargis, Rafiq Ghaznavi, Nur Jehan, Paro Devi - are not pieces concurrent with the events which they describe, but rather attempts to fix in memory a world which had been left behind forever.

Manto's portraits often bubble with a writer's insight into and sympathy for character, a feel for the shape of individual human nature in all its aspects. Here is a bit from his essay on Nargis, who became a star very young:

She was simple and playful like a child and was always blowing her nose as if she had a perennial cold - this was used in the movie Barsaat as an endearing habit. Her wan face indicated that she had acting talent. She was in the habit of talking with her lips slightly joined. Her smile was self-conscious and carefully cultivated. One could see that she would use these mannerisms as raw material to forge her acting style. Acting, come to think of it, is made of just such things.

Another thing I noticed about her was her conviction that one day she would become a star, though she appeared to be in no hurry to bring that day closer. She did not want to say farewell quite yet to the small joys of girlhood and move into the larger, chaotic world of adults with its working life.

"Acting, come to think of it, is made of just such things." With this one sentence, presented as a tentative thought, Manto establishes the relation between what might be said to be a person's real self and the acted self that they project for the camera, showing how they overlap and are nourished by each other. Stars From Another Sky may be not just the most dazzling but also the truest book ever written about Bollywood.

Several stories by Manto have been made into films: Mrinal Sen's Antareen (1994), Fareeda's Kali Shalwar (2001), and Toba Tek Singh by the Pakistani director Afia Nathaniel in 2005, but I have not had the fortune of seeing any of these. Kishwar Ahluwalia's translation of Manto's story "The Hundred Watt Bulb" can be found here, and Mushirul Hasan's translations of the Manto's Partition stories can be found here. Here are two good accounts of Manto's life and work by Khalid Hasan and Khurram Ali Shafique.

Dhoni

My essay on the Indian wicketkeeper-batsman Mahendra Singh Dhoni appears today in the Sunday Telegraph. I've reproduced the original unedited piece here.

Mahendra Singh Dhoni is 24, hails from a part of India that has produced only a handful of Test cricketers, has a face a sculptor might have fashioned, wears his hair shoulder-length and with golden tints, drinks a litre of milk a day, loves fast bikes, keeps wickets as handily as any gloveman in the country, and smites the cricket ball as thrillingly as any batsman in the world. His three centuries at international level thus far have each touched a level of incandescence that batsmen sometimes achieve only once in a lifetime. These days his arrival at the crease is accompanied by a palpable rise in the temperature.

In twelve months Dhoni has moved from a virtual nonentity to one of the country's most feted cricketers - not easy in the country of Tendulkar, Sehwag, Dravid, Ganguly, and Pathan. Last month Kapil Dev, perhaps seeing in Dhoni some traces of his own limber, lashing batting style, went as far as to call him his "hero". Two weeks ago Pakistan's president Pervez Musharraf, whose usual sphere is the work of statesmen, nations, and other such serious things, was drawn into words of praise for Dhoni's hair. The man clearly has a strange and unpredictable effect on people. Among all India's Test wicketkeepers, only Farokh Engineer can have matched him for dash and brio.

Dhoni hails from Ranchi in Bihar, in the east of India, but he now plays Ranji Trophy cricket for Jharkhand, India's newest state - it was carved out of Bihar in November 2000, eleven months after Dhoni made his first-class debut. His story is in fact representative - while in the past a large percentage of Indian players were schooled in cities with flourishing cricket cultures like Bombay, Delhi, Madras, and Bangalore, increasingly they come from small towns and exhibit a healthy skepticism towards traditional orthodoxies. In his early years in domestic cricket Dhoni’s batting style was a little windy, hit-and-miss. But by 2004 he had learned to temper his game. Once he had displaced Dinesh Kaarthick in India's one-day line-up, he did not need much time to rest his case.

Sent up the order for the first time in a one-day game at Visakhapatnam last April against Pakistan, Dhoni made a stirring 148, driving and cutting ferociously on the up and haring down the pitch to hit the spinners over their heads. In the sapping heat no detail was revelatory of his desire to make his presence felt so much as his frenetic running between the wickets. Nor was he found wanting in invention. The Pakistani medium-pacer Abdul Razzaq was left shaking his head in disbelief after Dhoni suddenly went down on one knee and lap-swept him for four.

An even more remarkable performance was to follow five months later in a game against Sri Lanka. India were set a target of 299, and Dhoni came in at the fall of an early wicket. He began scrappily, but every so often a hit would fly clean out of the field, and he quickly reached fifty. He settled down when the field was set back, and kept motoring on. Again, hunting slow bowling down to the pitch of the ball – like Virender Sehwag, Dhoni believes that spin bowlers are to be dismissed from sight - he tore the Sri Lankan bowling to pieces. By the time he finished off the game with his tenth six he had amassed 183, the highest ever score by a batsman in a run-chase.

It is sometimes possible to locate the exact moment when a batsman provides convincing proof of his mettle. Last month Dhoni earned his spurs in Test cricket with a spectacular maiden Test hundred to help save the Faisalabad Test against Pakistan. Coming in to bat with India still over three hundred runs in arrears in the first innings, Dhoni found himself assailed by Shoaib Akhtar in the middle of a furious burst. The seventh ball he faced was a screaming bumper. For a split second it looked as if it had him pinned, then Dhoni's bat appeared as if from round a corner and hooked it off his eyebrows for six. And then he was off, careering to fifty from only 34 balls and his century from 93.

Dhoni's runs in Test cricket this season, coupled with Irfan Pathan's improving prowess with the bat, have massively boosted India's already formidable batting. And in one-day cricket he has been India’s most influential batsman in the last year. He now averages nearly 54 from 35 games at a strike-rate of better than a run a ball, and the most recent ICC one-day rankings for batsmen placed him at No.3 in the world.

There is something pugilistic about Dhoni's air at the crease, about the way he skips up and down between balls and sometimes cuffs his gloves together before taking guard. The extravagant theatricality of his strokemaking extends all the way to his follow-through, in the way he almost sweeps himself off his feet when driving off the back foot or pulling and hooking. Like Adam Gilchrist, to whom he has been instantly compared, Dhoni exudes an intense restlessness with the bat in hand. Both are instinctive shotmakers willing to take chances in order to score quickly and prevent the opposition from closing in around them. Both can turn a game around in half an hour.

There are still some rough edges to Dhoni's cricket. Because he sights the ball so early and goes so hard at it, he is vulnerable to the good-length delivery leaving him off the pitch. And while his keeping has shown steady improvement - he was one of the first in the Indian team to wholeheartedly embrace Greg Chappell's new ideas and work ethic - he still has some way to go before his work to slow bowling reaches the level of the last Indian wicketkeeper to keep outstandingly to spinners, Nayan Mongia. Surprisingly, in a land of chirpy wicketkeepers, he is fairly quiet behind the stumps. In front of them his booming bat does all the talking he needs to.


I also had the good fortune of watching live Dhoni's maiden international hundred against Pakistan at Visakhapatnam last year. Here is my piece from last April about that innings, "A Man Possessed".

Mumbai's Roads, Always Under Repair

Mumbai's roads are always under repair,
These roads always on the sickbed lie,
Mumbai's citizens are always in de'pair,
Wondering they live in this city why.

Tar, cement, pitch and sand,
Strew the roads and clog them good,
Bricks pass slowly from hand to hand,
Everything takes twice the time it should.

On foul vapours does the citizen choke,
His face is always streaked with grime,
The dust enters and cakes his throat,
He's stuck in traffic all the time.

And up above the open sky,
Empty but for a lonely kite,
Are there no roads in that universe high?
Nothing in the spaces of the starry night?

Samrat Upadhyay's Royal Ghosts

My essay on the Nepali writer Samrat Upadhyay appears in the Los Angeles Times today. It is reproduced here in a slightly modified form.

The Royal Ghosts
Samrat Upadhyay
Mariner, 2006
$12

Most writers, even if they are not especially showy, intend us at least to linger upon a metaphor or a sentence, to notice the brightness of a phrase. But Samrat Upadhyay is among the smoothest and most noiseless of contemporary writers. His is an abstemious art: he sees that his characters, mostly members of the middle and lower classes — businessmen, middle-rung workers, housewives, servants — do not think in any obviously literary manner, and he strives to keep his work in the same key as their lives. He resolutely eschews metaphors, makes sparing use of colons and semicolons, and almost never resorts to that word so favored by short-story writers: "suddenly." His work is so subtle that it does not even seem especially subtle.

Although he has resided in America for nearly two decades, Upadhyay has never lost touch with his native Nepal, a country that has produced very little English-language fiction. Indeed, the capital, Katmandu, is the locale for all of his work. His debut collection of stories, Arresting God in Kathmandu, showed people negotiating a thicket of choices in a close-knit, tradition-bound society in which the needs and preferences of families are as important as those of individuals and various codes of caste and class restrict the free intermixing of people. (For example, even adults cannot marry without parental approval and, in fact, often have their life partners chosen for them by their parents.)

In a magazine interview, Upadhyay has described life as "a constant negotiation between limits and freedom from those limits, regardless of culture." The country of his birth has given him an especially rich mine of material in which the tension between individual freedom and societal constraints is evenly weighted and therefore narratively compelling. It is to his credit that in his 2001 stories and the 2003 novel The Guru of Love, he writes about Nepali society in English, for a primarily Western readership, without ever letting the whiff of exoticism invade his work.

Upadhyay returns in his new collection of stories, The Royal Ghosts, to themes familiar from Arresting God, the most pervasive of which is the struggle of men and women to understand each other, to work their way across the hollows and uncertainties that lie between them and find a way of living together. He often writes from the point of view of an interested third party, not just one or the other protagonist. (As if to dramatize how intricately people's lives are linked with others, his stories always attend closely to the lives of at least four or five characters and how they feel about one another. This gives his stories a kind of novelistic roominess.)

In "Father, Daughter," Shivaram is alarmed by the behavior of his daughter. She has left her husband — a match Shivaram arranged — for no other reason than that she cannot love him and has resumed an earlier liaison with the son of a low-caste cobbler. Conscious of the disapproving murmurs all around him, Shivaram declines to participate in her second marriage, so that "people would say less, say that he'd at least attempted to protect his dignity." His speculative knowledge of his daughter's motives and feelings, and his mixture of perplexity, outrage, tenderness and frailty, gives the story an unusual charge.

In "A Servant in the City," a teenage village boy, Jeevan, is a servant to a single woman and witnesses her affair with her former employer, which has made her a pariah. Gradually she confides in Jeevan, who supports her through her low spells. Over time, Jeevan finds that he has become "strangely possessive of her, as if he were the only one who truly knew her." He suspects that her lover will never keep his promise to leave his wife and marry her, and one day Jeevan blurts out these thoughts, turning from a spectator into an agent. Reprimanded by his mistress for his insolence, he thinks about returning to the village, "to remind himself where he came from."

A new pressure is also at work on Upadhyay's characters: politics and recent events in Nepal. The young democracy overseen by a monarchy has endured a turbulent five years. In 2001, the crown prince fatally shot several members of the royal family, including his father, King Birendra, in a drunken fit before turning his gun upon himself. Since then the country has been riven by a bloody Maoist uprising that has taken thousands of lives. The Royal Ghosts shows how the tension among the monarchy, democrats and communists has eroded the country's social fabric, demolishing the old stability against which the characters of Arresting God in Kathmandu played out their lives. This darkness and violence lie at the edges of several stories in the new collection and are addressed explicitly in a few of them.

In "The Weight of a Gun," the elderly Janaki finds a gun hidden under the mattress of her schizophrenic son, Bhola, who has often boasted that he is a Maoist. She lifts it gingerly, her head buzzing with questions. "Holding it carefully, she peeked out of the window. People were going about their business." Everything is as normal, but this one gesture of Janaki's is revelatory; she has stepped over the threshold and has been sucked into the morass.

Even when he engages most closely with politics, Upadhyay always illuminates the private realm, as in the book's splendid title story. On the morning that word of the killings in the royal family sends shockwaves across Nepal, Ganga, a taxi driver mistrustful of the monarchy and generally of all those in power, drives around Katmandu, observing various scenes. He pays a visit to his younger brother Dharma, who works in a photocopy shop.When Ganga enters the shop, it is dark. He sees his brother sprawled naked on a bed with another man. Learning that Dharma is homosexual hits Ganga much harder than the death of the monarch.

Distraught, he beats up his brother, then wanders from place to place. (Upadhyay's characters are great wanderers — when they feel tense about something, they go for a walk.) Late that night, a very drunk Ganga seeks out an acquaintance, who wonders if there was some conspiracy behind the killings. Ganga's response meshes the day's two big events. "Maybe, maybe," he slurs, interpreting history through family. "How can we know what goes on behind closed doors? We cannot even know with our own relatives."

Jeet Thayil's reading

The poet Jeet Thayil has some worthy observations about literature and some good picks in recent books by new Indian writers on the books page of the Times of India yesterday. I concur with Thayil's view that a lot of new Indian writers are "producing unexpected work in terms of genre and language" - I've read three very good first novels by Indian writers in the last two months alone (I've written about two here and here, and the third is my friend Sonia Faleiro's The Girl). And Thayil has some very good things to say too about Henry James and Naipaul. I quote the whole piece here:

I liked Rupa Bajwa's The Sari Shop, Samit Basu's The Manticore's Secret, Pankaj Mishra's An End to Suffering: The Buddha In The World, Sarnath Banerjee's Corridor, Rana Dasgupta's Tokyo Cancelled, Siddhartha Deb's Surface.

It's good to know there are young Indians producing unexpected work in terms of genre and language. And it's good to know Indian publishers are finally willing to take a risk and take on fresh material. India has more young people than ever before and they deserve a new kind of writing.

I think he's the master of the semi colon and the em dash. Look at the first paragraph of A Way In The World for an example of authoritative punctuation. I go to Dante for the difficulty, to remind myself that there's no need, ever, to explain.

For pleasure, I read cookbooks and Salim Ali's The Book Of Indian Birds, which has some delightful passages.

For instance this description of the Malabar Whistling Thrush: "In breeding season, male has a rich and remarkably human whistling song, rambling aimlessly up and down the scale, whence the bird gets its popular name of 'Idle Schoolboy'."

My favourite characters from literature are Moby Dick, Babar, Aeon Flux, Billy the Kid, Agastya Sen, Job, Nancy Drew, Nick Charles, Saleem Sinai, the cities of Bombay and New York.

As for a favourite line, at the moment probably this line from an Edward Thomas poem: 'Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon.'

Here are some poems by Thayil - they're not entirely to my taste, but you can make up your own mind about them. He can also be found in conversation with the writer Eunice D'Souza here. And here's another piece by him on a subject on which any alert Indian moviegoer could come up with his or her own essay: "Borrowed by Bollywood". I don't possess a copy of A Way In The World, but if some reader who does could quote the first paragraph in a comment, we could all have a look at that.

And here's another very good piece by another Indian poet, Keki Daruwala: "On Writing in English: an Indian poet’s perspective". Daruwala says very perceptively, about the endeavour to find a poetic language apposite to his circumstances: "In university one had been brought up on a diet of Shelley and Keats. When you left the campus you faced harsh reality around you -- drought, poverty and communal riots. One needed a harsh language, words with a saw-edge, words which rasped and got into you like the shards of a broken bottle. Slowly, almost unconsciously the poems developed a vocabulary and a soundscape of their own." A good interview with Daruwala in the Hindu can be found here.

Comments enabled

Ok, in response to a growing chorus of voices (and also a lot of mail on my previous post on Rang De Basanti), I'm enabling moderated comments on the Middle Stage.

I'm not online for very long everyday, so my replies will sometimes be less regular than normal - and nonexistent when I'm travelling - but I'm looking forward to some dialogue.

Against Rang De Basanti

On Saturday I went to watch Rang De Basanti with some friends at Paras Cinema in Nehru Place. Aamir Khan's latest foray into Indian history is without question a cinematic venture of remarkable daring - it left me completely stunned. In almost two decades of watching Bollywood productions I have never come across such preposterous drivel as that served up in the second half of this film (one reason for this, of course, is that Rang De Basanti takes itself so seriously).

Rang De Basanti is about a group of youths, pleasure-loving, individualistic, largely ignorant of their country's history and cynical about its future (this much of the film is by and large well done; the characters are true to life and the dialogue is witty). Under the direction of a young British filmmaker keen to recreate some of the episodes of the Indian independence movement, particularly from the lives of Bhagat Singh and Chandrashekhar Azad, they begin to gain a sense of a past that is now remote to many young Indians, and are forced to rethink many of the beliefs and attitudes towards life that they previously took as given. Although the sudden metamorphosis into sepia-tinted drama, in which the characters play out episodes from the lives of Indian revolutionaries, is clumsy, one accepts it because Hindi cinema is rarely perfect - at least it is an attempt to do something inventive.

But what follows not only stretches the boundaries of logic, it also sends out a dangerous and incendiary message that, if anything, works against what the film seems to be trying to convey to us: that we should stand up to be counted, attempt to honestly do what we can to improve our situation.

Halfway through the film there appears a young army pilot Ajay Rathore (played by the actor Madhavan) who baits the other youths about their cynical attitude towards their country - he voices, as it were, the message of the film. Later, Rathore is killed when his plane, one of the MIG-21s which have earned such notoriety in our country, suddenly crashes. At first his friends are only griefstruck, but later they become outraged when it appears that official negligence, especially corruption at the highest levels of government, has been to a great extent responsible for the tragic loss not only of Ajay's life but those of other young pilots. They take out a demonstration against the Defence Minister (Mohan Agashe), who organises a police lathi charge to deal with them, in which Ajay's mother is seriously injured.

At this point our heroes suddenly begin to hear the whispers of history in their brains. What did Bhagat Singh and Azad do in a similar situation (the lathi charge is likened to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre)? They took matters into their own hands. Thus, inspired by their newfound idols, they decide arbitrarily that no other recourse exists than to assassinate the Defence Minister. They carry out the assassination in a cold-blooded manner - and this is where the film is most dishonest, showing us a reconstruction of the revolutionaries lying in wait for Dyer, and then cutting to the youths waiting outside the minister's house in the same pose.

Also, the father of one of the youths is a henchman of the minister's, and also has blood on his hands in the matter of the defective MIG planes. The solution here again is to kill him in cold blood - his son does this himself. Clearly, when it comes to sounding the drum rolls of justice, family ties are of no importance. Indeed, there is something chilling and repulsive about a young man so willing to play judge, jury and executioner to his own father for the crime of corruption. Rakeysh Mehra may believe there is something tragic-romantic about the character's behaviour, but in truth it is nothing other than barbaric.

Even worse things are to come. The country is shocked by the minister's assassination, and with a bit of help from his party's propaganda machinery (the bright saffron worn by the functionaries leave no doubt as to which party is intended) he becomes a martyr. Our heroes are once again in the throes of despair. What is to be done now?

Another bright idea: the revolutionaries of old actually furthered the cause, the spread of the truth, by giving themselves up to the police, thereby enlisting the country's sympathies. So our young men make haste for the All-India Radio office, take it hostage (again they feel no qualms about drawing guns), and broadcast the truth about the minister's evil deeds over national radio. Hundreds of people around the country are shown listening to the broadcasts, and being persuaded by their message that the steps they took were the only ones they could have possibly taken. They phone in by the dozens to express their support. The building in which our bright young revolutionaries are holed up is surrounded by the police. In another of the film's many excruciatingly painful scenes, we see the young men celebrating the success of their mission, and embracing each other warmly in at least a dozen successive shots as victory music plays on the soundtrack. Never do they appear so self-involved, deluded, and plain daft as at the point when they have apparently made their greatest sacrifice. Right after that they are gunned down by the police, and become martyrs themselves.

Unholster your pistols then, O youth of India, and if you've been wronged in any way, think of who it is you want to eliminate. The worst thing about Rang De Basanti is that not only does it sloppily promote the idea that violence is fine as long as you are persuaded that the cause is right, it uses an absurd parallel from history to legitimise it, and at every stage superimposes the frame of history upon the action. Even as it seems to argue that the youth of the country should take responsibility for our shared predicament, it finds a convenient scapegoat for our problems in the figure of a politician, and makes the elimination of one or two people the object of the action. Attempting to stimulate us to greater awareness and maturity, it instead promotes an adolescent view of political action. It wildly mixes all kinds of things from all kinds of places, and rolls them up into one gigantic farrago of nonsense which it attempts to rush past the viewer and stun him or her into agreement.

It seems to me that it is high time that Aamir Khan got off his nationalism-patriotism-'wake-up, you-people' hobbyhorse. His last two attempts in the genre have produced two turkeys, and he appears to have forgotten that he after all an actor, someone who gets into the skin of different kinds of people with varying motives and preoccupations, not just someone who embodies the voice of the resistance in different accents and from different points in history.

We are often told that we should attend to the lessons of history, but if there was ever an argument against it, then that is Rang De Basanti.

Here are some older posts about other Hindi films: Nagesh Kukunoor's Iqbal, and Anurag Kashyap's Black Friday.

José Saramago's Unknown Island

Anyone who has opened a book by the Portuguese novelist José Saramago will have realised that he is not a writer who makes any concessions to the reader: he demands all that we have to give. For one, Saramago writes great chunks of prose that sometimes go on for pages without offering the reader the hospitality of a paragraph break. When he uses direct speech he does so without quotation marks or indentations. Thus when reading him we often find, to quote a phrase from an essay by Milan Kundera on Kafka, that "the eye finds no place to stop or rest".

Additionally, Saramago’s themes are often difficult, and his work is by turns fantastical, allegorical and even heretical. Blindness imagines a whole society afflicted by a loss of sight and the chaos that this brings in its wake. The Gospel according to Jesus Christ earned him the condemnation of the Catholic Church for its portrayal of Jesus not as the Son of God but of Joseph, and of God himself as a kind of power-hungry dictator. Something of this contrarian spirit, this determination to invert accepted ways of seeing things and indeed to be always at odds with power, can also be seen in the speeches and comments made by Saramago, an unreconstructed communist. In 2002 he courted controversy by likening the Israeli occupation of the West Bank to the Holocaust, and George Bush's re-election in 2004 prompted him to make several acidic observations on America's role in world politics.

Nevertheless, Saramago is too good a writer to ignore, for he is that rarest of rare things, a genuine stylist whose distinctive voice and way of looking at the world is stamped on every sentence he writes. It seems to me that if you were looking to approach Saramago for the first time, you should read his beguiling little fable The Tale of the Unknown Island. It is such a slim volume (one could have easily fit it into the recent Pocket Penguin series) that one might with justification call it a short story, except that it manages even at this length to convey a sense of amplitude – of a beginning, a middle, an end, and even the sense of a future – that is novelistic.

Saramago’s tale begins like a story from The Arabian Nights. We hear the voice of someone telling us the story more distinctly than we hear the characters themselves, and the narrative of a man approaching a king with a request is a convention perhaps as old as storytelling itself:

A man went to knock at the king’s door and said, Give me a boat. The king’s house had many other doors, but this was the door for petitions. Since the king spent all his time sitting at the door for favours (favours being offered to the king, you understand), whenever he heard someone knocking at the door for petitions, he would pretend not to hear, and only when the continuous pounding of the bronze doorknocker became not just deafening, but positively scandalous, disturbing the peace of the neighbourhood (people would start muttering, What kind of king is he if he won’t even answer the door), only then would he order the first secretary to go and find out what the supplicant wanted…. Then, the first secretary would call the second secretary, who would call the third secretary…

Many readers will no doubt find in this paragraph an accurate picture of the Indian bureaucracy, and if you substitute democratic politics for the rule of kings, it is possible to see also in this paragraph, especially in the wake of the recent cash-for-questions scandal, a picture of of Members of Parliament who spend their time sitting not at the door of petitions from those who have elected them but "at the door for favours".

Finally the king does appear, and is told by the man that he wants a boat to go "in search of the unknown island". The king is skeptical: no more unknown islands exist. The man is equally sure that he can discover one, and finally he is granted his boat. And as the man takes his leave to set off on his journey it turns out that the story has a hero and a heroine: the cleaning woman of the palace who, impressed by the man’s calm resolve, now decides that:

she had had enough of a life spent cleaning and scrubbing palaces, that it was time to change jobs, that cleaning and scrubbing boats was her true vocation, at least she would never lack for water at sea. The man has no idea that, even though he has not yet started recruiting crew members, he is already being followed by the person who will be in charge of swabbing down the decks and of other such cleaning tasks, indeed, this is the way fate usually treats us, it’s there right behind us, it has already reached out a hand to touch us on the shoulder while we’re still muttering to ourselves, It’s all over, that’s it, who cares anyhow.

The man gets his boat, and the cleaning woman becomes the first member of the crew, but they have no luck in recruiting other sailors for his voyage, for they all insist that there are no more unknown islands.

Even at its simplest, Saramago's writing tilts at deeper meanings. The voyage in pursuit of unknown islands serves in his book as a metaphor for self-discovery. He plays on the well-known saying that no man (or every man, depending on whether the speaker wants to insist that man is inextricably connected to society, or there is always a core to him that is inaccessible to others) is an island when he has his protagonist insist that "you have to leave the island in order to see the island, that we can’t see ourselves unless we become free of ourselves." We might say that this is one of the things great narrative art does: to allow us, through an extended empathetic engagement in the lives of others, to become free of ourselves, to leave our own islands (as I suggest in this post and this one).

A great deal more happens that night: the man realises he is falling in love with the cleaning-woman, and later he sees a dream in which a lot of fantastical things happen. Saramago's finish is wholly in keeping with the playful, whimsical spirit of his story. The next morning…

…as soon as the sun had risen, the man and the woman went to paint in white letters on both sides of the prow the name that the caravel still lacked. Around midday, with the tide, The Unknown Island finally set out to sea, in search of itself.

Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1998. His wonderful Nobel lecture, "How Characters Became the Masters and the Author Their Apprentice", can be found here, and an autobiographical essay here. Since Saramago takes his politics so seriously, here is an extract from a speech made by him in 2002, "For Whom The Bell Tolls", and here is an essay called "Reinventing Democracy" written in 2004. Julian Evans provides an excellent survey of Saramago's life and work here, and Philip Hensher has a very fine piece on literary endings here.

The despair of Attila Jozsef

The Hungarian poet Attila Jozsef (1905-1937) lived a short, sharp, incandescent life, wracked by poverty, loneliness, suffering and uncertainty, which he somehow managed to channel into verse of great beauty and poignancy. Born into a poor family and left in the care of foster-parents for some years before being restored to the care of his mother, who served in different households as a domestic help, Jozsef (like the young Charles Dickens, who when very young did a spell in a boot-blacking factory to bail out his debtstruck family) was forced to work from a very early age. In an autobiographical essay written in 1937, the year in which he took his own life by throwing himself under a freight train, Jozsef recounts all the things that he did to survive from day to day:

War broke out when I was nine and our lot became progressively worse. I did my share of queuing. There were occasions when I joined a queue at the foodstore at nine o'clock in the evening and just when my turn was coming at half past eight the next morning they announced that all the cooking fat had gone. I helped my mother as best I could. I sold fresh water in the Világ Cinema, I stole firewood and coal from the Ferencváros goods station so that we should have something to burn. I made coloured paper windmills and sold them to children who were better off, I carried baskets and parcels in the Market Hall, and so on.

Joszef's experiences prepared the ground for his verse. Few poets have written about poverty - its gnawing uncertainty, lack of hope, pathetic abjectness, raw despair - so powerfully. Here are the first three stanzas of his poem "What Will Become Of Him" in a translation by Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner:

What Will Become of Him...

What will become of him, whoever
has got no handle to his hoe,
upon whose whiskers crumbs don't quiver,
who dawdles, gloomy, thrawn, and slow;
who would from half a furlong's hoeing
keep one potato out of three,
whose hair falls out in patches, growing
bald unnoticed - who'd care to see?

What will become of him, whoever
has but five acres under crops,
whose draggled hen clucks at the stover,
whose thoughts nest in a mudhole's slops;
when no yoke clinks, no oxen bellow;
when mother serves the family soup
and steam from a liquid weak and yellow
drifts from the bottom of the scoop?

What will become of him, whoever
must live alone and work alone;
whose stew has neither salt nor savour,
the grocer gives no tick nor loan;
who has one broken chair for kindling,
cat sitting on the cracked stove's shelf;
who sets his keychain swinging, jingling,
who stares, stares; lies down by himself?

"Whose stew has neither salt nor savour,/the grocer gives no tick nor loan;" - those lines would make any other poet burn with envy. And even if we do not immediately get the meanings of words like 'thrawn', 'draggled' or 'stover', we are captivated merely by the sound of Jozsef's verbal music. (This alerts us to the truth of a remark made by TS Eliot on the poetry of Dante, often thought to be difficult and abstruse, "It is not necessary to understand the meaning first to enjoy the poetry…our enjoyment of the poetry makes us want to understand the meaning.”)

Jozsef wrote a great deal about a world such as this - hungry people appear often in his poems, including on several occasions the poet himself. Other poems are about his mother, now dead and gone to her grave ("Why did you bend your back over the washing?/That now in a box you should straighten it?"), and about what it means to be a poet, one of which pictures life as a glass of beer ("I quaff great draughts of reality,/neat world with foaming sky on top.") But Jozsef was also capable of writing in other keys. Here is his late poem "Lullaby", with its soft, murmuring sounds and its childlike acts of imagination, in a translation by Vernon Watkins:

Lullaby

The sky is letting its blue eyes close;
The house its many eyes closes, too.
The quilted meadow lies in a doze:
Go to sleep softly, little one, do.

The wasp and beetle are both asleep;
Their heads are down on their feet, and through
Darkness, a drone in the dark they keep:
Go to sleep softly, little one, do.

The tram has fallen asleep as well,
And while its rattling slumbers, too.
It tings in its sleep a little bell:
Go to sleep softly, little one, do.

The coat is sleeping across the chair,
The tear is sleeping where it's worn through;
No more to-day will it stretch the tear:
Go to sleep softly, little one, do.

The ball and whistle are both at rest.
So is the wood where the picnic grew.
Even your sweets by sleep are possessed:
Go to sleep softly, little one, do.

All will be yours in the crystal ball;
You'll be a giant, it will come true;
But just let your little eyelids fall:
Go to sleep softly, little one, do.

A fireman, soldier, herder of sheep,
You'll be all three, and each will be you.
See, your mother is falling asleep:
Go to sleep softly, little one, do.

Some more translations of Jozsef's poems by Ozsváth and Turner, from their collection The Iron-Blue Vault, can be found here. And an archive of 20 translations of Joszef by different hands is here, along with the essay by Jozsef from which I quoted earlier. An excellent essay on Jozsef by the Hungarian émigré writer George Szirtes, winding through his work but also dwelling upon the nature of translation itself, can be found here.

And while we're on Hungarian literature, let me also try to interest you in the work of the novelist Sandor Marai, whose two novels available in English translation, Embers and Casanova in Bolzano, are among the best novels I've ever read. Embers was published in India by Penguin, and is quite easily available. I've written an essay on Marai's work here.

On Siddharth Chowdhury's Patna Roughcut

Like another recent novel, Altaf Tyrewala's No God In Sight, Siddharth Chowdhury's Patna Roughcut has no narrative centre. There is no single point of view from which the story is told and which holds all the material together, although, unlike No God In Sight, the novel does have a central character: Ritwik Ray, a journalist with a daily in Patna.

Ritwik, we are told, went to university in Delhi (indeed, he is the first character I have come across in Indian fiction who went to the same college as I did, Hindu College) but, instead of staying on in the capital after his studies, or even seeking to go abroad like his girlfriend Mira, he decides to come back to the city where he grew up, work there, and write a book of stories. The novel has several themes - the relationship between provincial centre and metropolitan capital, the nature of childhood experience and adolescent sexual awakening, the moral apathy and entrenched prejudices of the Indian middle-class - but the most important one, in my reading, is the way in which we are formed, at that period of life when our personalities are most open to influence, by the striking character and passions and dreams of certain people around us - how what we think of as the discrete individual personality is to a great extent a series of relationships and inheritances.

The first two sections of the book, while told in the first person by Ritwik and notionally about his early life, are really odes to two characters who dominate his Patna childhood. Harryda is "a man who loved style": a good-looking, hard-drinking, high-living figure who plays cricket for a local club and dreams of writing scripts for movies ("He ate, slept, talked, breathed movies", we are told, and so does the book, which is full of references to cinema), but whose spirit is broken by a love affair that ends badly. Iladi is another character whose dreams shatter upon the rocks of reality (a clumsy metaphor, but in keeping with the spirit of this piece, for I borrow it a bit of dialogue from the film Deewar). A voracious reader, an idealist, and, as is often the case with idealists, a Marxist when she grows up, Iladi is attacked by an angry mob while staging a protest play in Delhi, and loses her life. Of her Ritwik writes: "She was the first person in my life who taught me that there was such a thing as a secret world of the mind which could be more real and enriching than the mundane reality of our meagre existence."

Chowdhury writes a kind of prose which, if sometimes peculiar in tone or construction, is almost always interesting. There are many instances in which he seems to feel no need for commas where ninety-nine out of a hundred writers would prefer to use one ("Devoid of any musical talent Happy just happily collected the money"; "Ila switched the radiogram off stopping Rosemary Clooney in mid-flight"). But he has a great feel for place, for piquant disorienting observations in which the oddest things are coupled together ("What is it with adolescent Patna convent girls and Edna St.Vincent Millay, I wonder sometimes"), and for details which are interpreted first by the eye and then by the imagination ("men coming from offices in their sweat-soaked and defeated shirts").

And finally, the last section of the book, "Waiting for Godard", is one of the very best pieces of extended prose I've read this year. It is narrated for most part by Mira, Ritwik's ex-girlfriend, now married to one of his best friends and settled in America, but back in Patna for a brief visit. The great advantage of first-person narration is that it allows one to recover the emotional immediacy of past experience, breaking down the border between the present and the past as is the case when we ourselves think about past events that have affected us deeply. Mira's narration roves over her childhood in Patna; her love affair with Ritwik during their years at Delhi University and all their shared moments and interests, such as a love for the movies - over little spots of time that, in retrospect, seem significant.

Then we arrive at the present moment, when the two run into each other at a Cine Society screening; Chowdhury depicts the rush of their respective feelings with an uncommon tenderness and empathy, and also finds for this episode the perfect finish. Patna Roughcut is worth your money just for this section alone.

Jai Arjun Singh also has a piece on Patna Roughcut here. And here are links to pieces about some other Indian novels that featured on the Middle Stage this year: Tyrewala's No God in Sight, Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay's Waiting For Rain, Saratchandra Chattopadhyay's Srikanta, and Attia Hosain's Sunlight On A Broken Column.

Nazim Hikmet in prison

The trial of the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, for having “publicly denigrated Turkish identity” with his remarks about the massacre of Armenians and Kurds by the Ottoman regime early in the twentieth century, makes this an apt time to recall the life and career of another Turkish writer prosecuted - indeed, persecuted - by the state for his controversial views: the most prominent name in modern Turkish poetry, Nazim Hikmet (1902-1963).

In 1938 Hikmet, who like a great many poets of his time (Pablo Neruda, for example) was a committed Marxist, was sentenced to 28 years in prison on charges of sedition for a long poem about a fifteenth-century rebellion against Ottoman rule. Hikmet’s case, like Pamuk’s now, received wide international attention. Indeed, the figure of Hikmet looms in Pamuk’s recent remarks (in an essay in the New Yorker) about his country’s historic persecution of writers, and his joke that it is only with his trial that he has become “a real Turkish writer”. In 1949 an international committee, including on its rolls Picasso and Sartre, was formed to campaign for Hikmet’s release, and in 1950, the year he was released by Turkey’s first democratically elected government, he received the World Peace Prize. Hikmet continued to be harassed even by the new regime, and eventually had to seek refuge in Poland.

His long years in prison, and the experience of hardship, privation and even torture, seemed to have focussed Hikmet’s attention on questions of life and death - on what it meant to be alive, to really live fully and vitally, and on the shadow of mortality that always hangs over life and renders our existence precarious and fragile. There are not many Hikmet poems in which these concerns do not come up in some form or the other. One of his most famous poems, “On Living”, begins: “Living is no laughing matter:/ you must live with great seriousness/ like a squirrel, for example-/ I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,/I mean living must be your whole occupation.” In another poem he speaks of the necessity of living as intensely as possible, of being “caught up/ in the flurry of the world”. His verse often reflects this; it is full of vivid details and small epiphanies. Here is another of his best-known poems, “Today is Sunday”:

Today is Sunday
Sunday today.
Today they took me out in the sun for the first time.
And I just stood there, struck for the first time in my life
by how far away the sky is,
how blue
and how wide.
Then I respectfully sat down on the earth.
I leaned back against the wall.
For a moment no trap to fall into,
no struggle, no freedom, no wife.
Only earth, sun, and me...
I am happy.

And in one of his most beautiful and affecting poems, Hikmet imagines his funeral:

My Funeral

Will my funeral start in our courtyard below?
How will you bring my coffin down three floors?
The lift will not take it
and the stairs are too narrow.

Perhaps the courtyard will be knee-deep in sunlight and pigeons
perhaps there will be snow and children's cries mingling in the air
or the asphalt glistening with rain
and the dustbins littering the place as usual.

If in keeping with the custom here I am to go, face open to the skies,
on the hearse, a pigeon might drop something on my brow, for luck.
Whether a band turns up or no, children will come near me,
children like funerals.

Our kitchen window will stare after me as I go,
the washing on the balcony will wave to see me off.
I have been happier here than you can ever imagine,
friends, I wish you all a long and happy life.

---------------------------------------------------
One stops upon the marvellous images of “the courtyard knee-deep in sunlight and pigeons” and the washing on the balcony waving the corpse off. And the booming final line asserts, just like the glittering details of the lines that precede it, the desire to breathe fully of life, celebrate its colours and textures, even at the point of taking leave of it. Has any poet ever made death seem so much fun?

Some of Hikmet’s other poems can be found here; I recommend in particular “Hymn To Life”, “Last Will and Testament”, "Things I Didn't Know I Loved", and the wonderfully poignant and plaintive “I Come and Stand at Every Door” (“I come and stand at every door/ But no one hears my silent tread”), which was made into a song by the Byrds. Hikmet’s most recent translators, Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk, observe, “Like Whitman, Hikmet speaks of himself, his country, and the world in the same breath. At once personal and public, his poetry records his life without reducing it to self-consciousness.”

Pamuk’s essay “On Trial” can be found here, and here is Pankaj Mishra’s recent essay about the Pamuk affair, “Secular Democracy Goes On Trial”. The Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer has an essay called "Literature, Censorship and the State" here, and here is an excellent essay on writing and censorship by the South African novelist JM Coetzee, from his book Giving Offence. And in his essay "Defend the right to be offended", written last February, Salman Rushdie writes: "The idea that any kind of free society can be constructed in which people will never be offended or insulted is absurd. So too is the notion that people should have the right to call on the law to defend them against being offended or insulted. A fundamental decision needs to be made: do we want to live in a free society or not?"

Cricket with Ram Guha

I’ve stayed up late several times in the last week reading Ramachandra Guha’s magnificent new book, The States of Indian Cricket: Anecdotal Histories. It’s not really a new book, in that it revises and updates two of his books published in the early nineties, Wickets in the East and Spin and Other Turns. I wonder how I missed them when they first came out, for I was just entering my teens then, and possessed a fine collection of cricket books, mostly culled from secondhand bookshops, that I prized dearly, reread incessantly – Harsha Bhogle’s biography of Azhar, a boyhood hero of mine, was a particular favourite – and kept on the bookshelf nearest to my bed. I don’t think I was ever as passionate about cricket as in those four or five years; everything else came second, and a pretty distant second too.

Wickets in the East is like an extended selection meeting, with the privilege of being able to rove over all of recorded history: in it Guha picks a representative eleven for each of the great regional powers of Indian cricket – Bombay, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Hyderabad, Delhi, Bengal, and some of the princely states of old – and goes over a lot of history in the process, always fluently and enjoyably. Spin and Other Turns consists of a series of long essays about the lead characters of Indian cricket’s ‘coming of age’ in the seventies – Sunil Gavaskar, Gundappa Viswanath, the famous spin quartet of Bedi, Chandrasekhar, Prasanna and Venkatraghavan, and Kapil Dev – all of whom Guha had the good fortune to watch at close quarters on many occasions. (For someone who is not a pure cricket writer by profession, Guha appears to have seen a massive amount of live cricket, including a great amount of Ranji Trophy play.)

The States of Indian Cricket contains some truly sumptuous prose. Here is Guha in a long lead-up to a cricketer he admired greatly, the wicketkeeper-batsman Budhi Kunderan:

Once or twice a year I take what must be one of the loveliest short drives in the country, the fifty-mile road that runs from Mangalore’s Bajpae airport to the university town of Manipal. Keeping the sea on the left, the road passes through acres of paddy fields, interspersed with areca gardens and the odd remnant of rain forest. Every five miles or so we drive over a river, a leisurely boatman in the water. The artefacts of man that one encounters include mosques, churches, Jain monasteries, and Hindu temples. Here in western Karnataka cultural diversity matches ecological diversity, the D’Souzas mixing with the Alis and the Raos, the forests with the fields and the ocean.
The names of the towns en route are charmingly quaint too. There is Parbidri and there is Kapu and, exactly halfway between them, there is Karnad. Whenever my taxi enters this settlement the driver will surely tell me, ‘Saar, Girish Karnad coming from here.’ I can sense and share his pride in the achievements of the writer-actor, a man who has brought lustre to his town, his state, and his country. But I wish I could, at least once, summon up wit to tell the driver, as he passes through the next town on our way: ‘Saar, this is Mulki. Budhi Kunderan coming from here.’

In his essay about Gundappa Viswanath, Guha speaks about how popular the gentle, unassuming Viswanath was with both his team-mates and his opponents: he was “the best-loved cricketer” of his time. Among the traits of Viswanath’s batting against the spinners is that he virtually never lifted the ball. These details serve as a background to this story recounted by Guha:

…I once watched Vishy, at the Ferozeshah Kotla, in a Ranji Trophy match between Karnataka and Delhi, being beaten on the back foot by a delivery from the rising university star Praveen Uberoi. The ball had come in late with the arm instead of, as the batsman had anticipated, spinning away towards the off side. The ball was only narrowly missing leg stump, and the bowler, after pleading with the umpire to give the decision in his favour, sank to the ground in despair. Vishy watched calmly, but at the beginning of Uberoi’s next over, came dancing down the wicket to send the ball into the crowd over extra-cover.
Even the gentlest of men are sometimes moved to show an upstart his place.

I choose The States of Indian Cricket as one of my four Indian books of the year, along with Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indian, the Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb, and Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay’s A Strange Attachment and Other Stories. And here is a much wider list of Indian books of the year by Sheela Reddy of Outlook.

An interview with Altaf Tyrewala

My review of Altaf Tyrewala's excellent new novel No God In Sight appears today in the Indian Express.

Your book is a collection of first-person narratives told by characters mostly based in Mumbai. Some of the speakers are related to each other, and give way to one another's stories - such as a man and his prospective wife, or the four members of a family - but no one character is aware of all the others. Yet the form of your novel suggests they are all linked to each other in some way, does it not?
Absolutely. In fact, the interconnectedness between my characters’ lives is merely a shallow, one-dimensional simulation of the multi-layered and impenetrable interconnectedness that actually exists in the real world between things and people and events.

One of the stories is that of an abortionist traumatised by 'unborn-baby voices' in his head. I particularly liked the bit in which he takes home a Nirvana tape sold to him by a foreign tourist, puts it on, and finds in the discordant music that starts up an analogue to the sounds that are tormenting him. How did you hit upon that unusual parallel?
When I wrote the abortionist’s voice in late 2000, I had just discovered Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged. I grieved for Cobain like he was kin. The ‘unborn-baby voices’ is itself a reference to ‘the unborn chicken voices in my head’ from Radiohead’s song "Paranoid Android". The abortionist’s is the first voice I wrote. I had no idea that this one-off experiment in literary ventriloquism would become a full-time activity for the next four years. Which is probably why the abortionist’s voice is so self-referential. I think I managed to remain more uninvolved while writing subsequent voices.

How hard or easy is first-person narration compared to third-person narration? Was there ever a stage when you considered telling these stories in any other way? Narration is excruciating, be it in first or third person. (This is where you would indicate ‘Laughs’ had this been a face-to-face.) I think we live in both first and third person. Most of the time we are being tossed around by external and internal circumstances and have to remain alert to the moment. Occasionally, though, things ease up a bit, the mud settles, allowing for a little perspective on life. I instinctively began writing monologues. But as you will have noticed in No God In Sight, long stretches of first-person are suddenly interrupted by third-person narration. There was no other way to do it without contradicting the rhythm of life.

I'm interested in the gestation period of No God In Sight, the time you spent walking around with the shape of it in your mind before you finally got down to work. How long was this period?
One day, while sending fake letters to a friend’s agony-aunt column, I began writing a query in the voice of an abortionist. The abortionist’s voice developed into a short story. His occupation had affected the lives around him, and it was crucial to account for those points of view as well. I wrote the abortionist’s father’s voice. And then came the father’s boss’s voice…. At times, at the end of a character’s voice, another character was already looming large, waiting to have his or her say. Unfortunately, I didn’t have it so easy throughout. Sometimes I just couldn’t take the plot forward. I would launch into a completely disconnected monologue, which would then bring forth its own set of characters, and this would lead to an independent mini story. It wasn’t a ‘book’ until almost two years into writing it. It was quite late in the day when I realized that I could link these mini-stories to create a larger whole. So no such gestation period. It was more of an organic occurrence.

Did you keep a kind of routine while writing it?
My routine was a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week kind of thing. Once I began writing full-time, everything I did was for my book. I was never really off. If I had just finished a voice, I would be away from the computer, but I would be going insane thinking about the next voice. I hope I can manage such single-minded devotion for my next book.

Do you find the time spent in composition pleasurable, or is it more like a hard slog?
I am an instinctual person. 99 per cent of my writing happened when I wasn’t writing. When I returned to the computer after days of planning a voice, it would be to chisel out, to sharpen an amorphous intuition that I had already arrived at. Of course one derives pleasure when one has succeeded in putting one’s vague perceptions into words. But I found greater pleasure when I was able to perceive a character’s essence - this was a wordless perception, beyond verbalization. How does one put it?

I'd like to ask you how hard it is for a writer to judge the quality of his or her own work. Here are my own thoughts on it: not only is it hard to read one's own work impersonally, one's objective judgement of it is also blocked off because, having worked on a sentence or a paragraph or a chapter several times, it is hard to respond to it in the manner of a reader coming to it for the first time…
I would’ve agreed with you four years ago. Now I’m not so sure. When something is good, you just know it. It doesn’t matter who has written it. But you have to first form a habit of honesty. (I don’t mean to sound sanctimonious at all.) I wasted too many months in the beginning defending something I’d written against my own self. Now the second I find myself rationalizing something I’ve written, either with myself or with someone else, I immediately know something is wrong. I am not recommending mindlessness. But I’ve come to realize that the ‘desire’ to express can lead to a lot of trouble. If one wants to be a writer, like most of us do in the beginning, one is almost certainly asking for a lot of heartache. But something happens through repeated failure. A sort of purification. Finally, one starts writing in spite of oneself; then everything falls into place. Also, I think the form of my book had let to a state of self-imposed multiple-personality-disorder. Writing the voices required me to continuously replace myself and my opinions. As a result, I was able to approach my work with a fresh perspective by default.

Your bio in the book says that you live 'in Bombay and Mumbai'. Would you care to elaborate on that? Are there any characters in the book who live 'in Bombay and Mumbai' too?
For me, any aspect of this city that is illusory (or artificial, or out-of-place) represents Bombay, i.e., air-conditioned restaurants, glass-sheathed office-complexes, mega-malls, SUVs, the escapist travesties from Bollywood, men and women who behave like they are in London or Tokyo… I am, of course, as guilty as anyone else of enjoying the spoils of Bombay. But no matter how hard we try to live out our fantasies, good old Mumbai catches up. Hopefully someday we will forge a more reasonable city. We could call it Mumbay or Bumbai.

Which are your favourite writers or books?
Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy in fiction (if one can call it that). And Robert Pirsig’s Laila in non-fiction.

Is the reading of poetry of any help to a prose writer? Do you read poetry at all?
I don’t read poetry. But I do listen to music a lot, and for me that’s a more dyamic form of poetry.

And finally, let's finish on a non-literary note. What's a really good but relatively little-known restaurant in Mumbai?
Tea Centre's take-out counter has got to be the most pleasant surprise awaiting people in Churchgate. It's a small air-conditioned room adjoining the main restaurant. It has a single, semi-circular table jutting out from the wall surrounded by three high chairs, which means that you and whoever you're with are the only ones in there. And you get everything – the teas, the snacks (veg & non), and the deserts – for less than half the price you'd be paying inside TC. Sometimes I wish I could live there.

Coming up this month

...in the next fortnight, probably, on the Middle Stage will be essays on new Indian fiction, including Altaf Tyrewala's No God In Sight and Siddharth Chowdhury's Patna Roughcut. And also perhaps a look at the Little Magazine's recently released anthology of Asian fiction published on its pages over the years.

Seven views of Puri

Puri, in Orissa on the east coast of India, is one of India's four dhams, places thought to be marked by the presence of the gods. Historically a spiritual retreat and a place of pilgrimage, it is now also a modern-day seaside resort and tourist draw.

One
Puri beach on a Sunday evening in November. To my right the sun is sinking rapidly, and to my left a gibbous moon is already halfway up the sky. In front of me great surf-topped waves rear and expend themselves upon the shore, and on the beach a clamorous throng of people are at work and play.

Men undressing for a dip, youths at sport with beach balls, mothers leading children by the hand into the water, a gaggle of squealing and giggling girls, and some doleful elderly couples who look as if they have been sent on vacation by force. Intermixed with these vacationers are photographers of dubious merit hanging around like touts; purveyors of cotton candy and bobbing balloons and jhal muri sellers with their tins strapped around their waist do their rounds; and sellers of singaras and roshogollas carrying their wares on a wooden pole across their shoulders, stooped and sombre like yoked bullocks. And animals: bucking ponies with tinkling bells around their necks, a bad-tempered camel loping across the sand with its nose in the air, and bony mongrels scavenging for scraps in the sand and occasionally lifting up a hind leg to water it.

And behind me, at the balcony of almost every room of the seven-storeyed pink-and-yellow Puri Hotel and of several other hotels on either side of it, are dozens of chatting, eating, smoking or silent vacationers, determined to exploit the view from their rooms.

Two
Almost no one who comes to Puri leaves without visiting the temple of Lord Jagannath, the town's throbbing centre and the motor of its economy as much as its spiritual life. I have arrived at the time of the panchuka, the auspicious last five days of the month of Kartik, and the temple and its environs teem and ripple with thousands upon thousands of people. Large tents outside the temple are the sites of sermons, discussions and devotional singing; the sounds of pounding drums, clashing cymbals, and voices on loudspeakers rend the air. It takes me ten minutes to leave my shoes at a stand, and another five to wash my feet before I enter.

Almost a thousand years old, and segregated from the rest of the city by a fortress-like wall, the temple complex is a world unto itself. It contains not just the main shrine housing the trinity of Jagannath, Balabhadra and Subhadra but also dozens of subsidiary temples; a vast kitchen that makes many different types of preparations, all steam-cooked in earthen pots over firewood, and which can feed as many as a lakh of people a day; and a market, Ananda Bazar, where this mahaprasad is sold.

As with a great city, so with the temple: one's first encounter with it is disorienting. Milling devotees, grasping priests, ululating women, wizened old people with skin like parchment sitting placidly on the great marble slabs, muscular servitors bearing fragrant baskets of prasad to the market, chattering monkeys performing acrobatics from the scaffolding on one side of the temple, the smell of flowers, ghee and incense - the senses are assailed from all sides. And then there are the gods themselves. As I enter the main temple and move in the near darkness, pushed forward involuntarily by the crowd throbbing with religious ecstasy, towards the three deities installed in the inner sanctum, I feel hypnotised by the great staring eyes of these strangest of gods, and forget even to raise my hands. The experience ends abruptly: any person lingering in front of the deities is herded towards the exit by an irate policeman, and one moves out of this mysterious twilight world into the bright sunlight in a few seconds. I go out and come around a second time, and pay my respects properly.

Three
The first floor of a dilapidated building opposite the temple is home to a most gloomy and tenebrous old library - one can barely make out the books lying aged and tattered in the old wooden cupboards - called the Raghunandan Public Library. Only two people are seated at the tables inside: a youth reading Competition Success magazine, and a middle-aged man who is presumably the custodian: portly, bespectacled, and even more sullen than the camel on the beach. His myopic eyes stare out at some indefinable point in the middle distance; one imagines that many years spent in this hushed, airless gloom has gradually led to the dwindling of his powers of sight. When I ask him a question or two about books on the history of Puri he continues to look out blankly in front of him, venturing after a few seconds a reply in a voice so low that the sound melts away before the ear can pick it up. With some difficulty I gather that the library is soon about to close for the day; there is nothing he can possibly do for me.

I drop my interest in the books and, following a tip from a fellow traveller to Puri, get down to business: could I please go up through the library to the top floor to take a look at the temple from there? He freezes again for a while, then gets up and fetches a large register which he opens in front of me. In it I see a roster of names, none of them sounding Indian, and the amount each one of these people has donated, usually not less than a hundred rupees. Non-Hindus are not allowed inside the temple; this is how most foreigners take a look at it. I enter my name and write '20' next to it."Make it fifty," he says, his voice suddenly clear as a bell. "Twenty," I insist.

Somewhat grudgingly an ancient key is fetched to open the rusty lock of a door, and up we go one level, where we find another door. This too is unlocked; my friend steps back and ushers me up another flight of stairs; leaving him behind, I ascend onto a shaded terrace. Here I find a beautiful view not just of the eastern side of the temple but also, away to my right, the sandy Bada Danda, the great central road of Puri. If ever one was to shoot a film in Puri, this is the view one would want for an establishing shot: the road full of pilgrims and seekers, cycle rickshaws and vendors, priests and beggars, and lined on either side by high dharamshalas. If I take in this view for no more than a minute, it is because I am struck suddenly by the fear of the custodian, who retreated rather suspiciously at the last set of doors, locking me in and going off home. I imagine myself perched here for the rest of the day, my shouts drowned out by the din of the jostling masses below. I scurry down the stairs and find to my relief the doors still open. Descending another level I find the custodian, his face inscrutable as ever, shutting and barring the beautiful green and pink stained-glass windows looking out onto the street. "Aapne dekha?" he asks.

Four
Laxmi Talkies, the oldest of Puri's five decrepit cinemas, was set up in 1934. Located on a cramped little lane, it has temples to either side of it, making for a rather strange atmosphere: a pleasure-house surrounded by piety. The film currently playing is Sasu Ghara Chali Jibi (literally, I Will Go Off To My In-laws, a translation that makes the film look like a comedy). I buy a balcony ticket for ten rupees, walk up the dingy ill-lit staircase stained by chewing tobacco- and paan-spit, and settle down at the back of the cinema. More than a decade has passed since I last saw an Oriya film.

To my surprise, the opening credits show that it is a Rajshri production - I didn't know the Barjatyas were into producing Oriya films. About a quarter of an hour into the film, I realise that we are watching an Oriya adaptation of Hum Aapke Hain Koun, the Salman Khan-Madhuri Dixit blockbuster from 1994. All the staples of a Rajshri film are present: the characters utter hoary pieties about the sanctity of family values and traditions; everyone seems obsessed with the idea of marriage; and several dream sequences provide convenient opportunities for song and dance. There is even a Laxmikant Berde lookalike for some juvenile comedy, and the soundtrack is liberally laced with tunes borrowed from other Rajshri hits, such as Maine Pyar Kiya. The heroine, Anu Choudhury, is surprisingly attractive and good at her job, but the hero, Siddhant Mohapatra, looks too old for the role, and in my memory at least he will never be able to live down his appearance in one song in a transparent white muslin shirt with puffs at the shoulders.

During the brief periods in the film without background music I hear a loud whirring - the sound of the film projector upstairs. During the interval I climb up another dark flight of stairs and come upon Rashmi Ranjan Das, the projectionist, at work in his little garret. His ancient 35mm Westrex projection system, clamped down into the floor, exudes an elephant-like strength and solidity. Das himself is agitated: his assistant has just tangled up a spool of film while reloading it into its can after use. "A nice bit of work you've left me here!" he snaps. Looking at the coils of exposed film lying on the table in the near darkness, I can just about discern the shapes of human figures on their surface - still photographs lined by a sound track which, rushed through the Westrex at twenty-four frames a second, bloom into the very image of reality.

Five
Swargadwar ("Gateway to Heaven"), the area at the south end of the road running alongside Puri beach, is called so because of the holy cremation ghat it houses, but the mood in the streets around it is anything but funereal, especially in the evenings. Brightly lit shops ("We accept all Visa and Mastercards") sell Orissa handloom sarees, jewellery, and replicas of the Jagannath Temple and the Sun Temple of Konark; beachside stalls and Bengali restaurants cater to the tourist traffic; and newspaper vendors cycle up and down the streets calling out "Ananda Bazar Patrika! Bartaman!"

The ghat itself is a little square of darkness and silence in the centre of this worldly bustle; here the only lights are not those of bulbs and lanterns but of the slow-burning funeral pyres. Groups of men stand around the pyres, and cows nestle in the sand, drawing warmth from it on this cold winter evening. Hindu funeral rites are more distressing than those of many other religions; one watches as a familiar form is set ablaze and turns into a heap of bones and ashes before one's eyes; no one who has witnessed one cremation can ever view life in quite the same way again. Walking down the cement paths lining the sandpits I come across a grisly scene: a pair of small, thin legs sticking out a lighted pyre. A child! perhaps seven or eight years old, sent early on its way. As I look at the crackling flames and the two forlorn legs refusing to burn, the order of existence seems terribly unjust and arbitrary.

I ask one of the men standing by the pyre how the death happened. "Of natural causes," he says in a low voice, and points to another man. "She was his grandmother - very old, in her eighties." The meaning of the scene suddenly changes, and the spectacle seems more bearable; I breathe a little easier. I begin to walk again; the faces all around me are blank, expressionless. Above our heads thick smoke drifts into the sky, carrying off, if one so believes, spirits released from their earthly shells.

Six
Across the road from Swargadwar can be found a quite different sort of crackling and roasting - fish and chicken being fried at Santosh's fast food stall and the stalls of several others like him. Santosh is 28, and he works the stall in conjunction with his father. Their day begins early with a visit to Ghoda Bazaar, the fish market near the railway station, where they buy prawns, crabs, and bhetki quite cheaply; these are then taken home and spiced or prepared in other ways for the final dip in hot oil at the stall in the evening. Santosh is a cheerful sort; he calls out in Bengali to the passing tourists, "Hello, sir! What's the matter this evening? Won't you be stopping for a bite?" Those who stop to eat are shepherded by his assistant to a row of plastic chairs behind the stall, where they wait while Santosh serves up their order. A batter-fried bhetki sells for ten rupees; a crab for seven; a chicken leg for fifteen; and little prawn baras for a rupee each. These are served with chopped onion ("Careful!" exclaims Santosh to his helper, "Onions are twenty rupees a kilo!") and dashes of red and green sauce that go under the brand name of Poonam's, which he buys at sixteen rupees a litre. Profit margins are small; the business depends on volumes. Tomorrow Santosh is off with his father to Cuttack for the Balijatra, the annual festival in celebration of Orissa's maritime past, where they have rented a stall and will make only vegetarian food - chowmein, pakoras. I sample a bhetki - fair - and then a crab, whose sweet meat is more to my liking.

The next morning I rise at five and take a rickshaw to Ghoda Bazaar to look at the fish market. All is quiet; near the station I cross a family of four being taken, luggage and all, on a rickshaw, almost in slow motion. In my mind I have an image of the big, bustling fish market opposite Novelty Cinema near Grant Road station in Bombay, but the reality is quite different. At about half-past six a few surly, bedraggled fisherfolk turn up on a narrow street with baskets of fish they lay out on pieces of tarpaulin. There are prawns and crabs, bhetki and rohu; heaps of small, almost translucent fish, and some large silver fish predictably called chandi. I can't buy any: the only one I know who will cook them for me is Santosh, and he is off today to the Balijatra.

Seven
On my last evening in Puri I decide to visit some of the dozen or so dharamshalas, massive granitic structures mostly between three and seven decades old, that line the Bada Danda; indeed, the wide straight swathe of the Bada Danda and the symmetrical, orderly facades of the dharamshalas are the only clean lines in a scene otherwise flooded with disorder.

The Debidutt Dooduawala dharamshala, the most majestic and imposing of the lot, was built in 1929 by the aforenamed man's son, Rai Bahadur Hazarimull Dooduawala. It has 65 rooms over three stories for the use of pilgrims on a first-come-first served basis, with a maximum stay of three nights. "The only exception we make is for the old widows who come to observe the vrat of the month of Kartik. We allow them to stay the whole month," says Madhusudan Kuntia, the manager, in his poky little office just off the entrance into the building. "Four to six people can stay in a room. Small rooms cost 25 rupees a night, large rooms 40 rupees. Tell me, where can you find rooms at such prices these days?" On Mr.Kuntia's desk is an electricity bill for a little over four thousand rupees, and a giant red book almost the size of a canvas, the biggest bound volume I have ever seen. It is his ledger; he opens it and shows me his list of entries of which party has come, how many rooms they have taken, how many men, how many ladies, how many children. It is like the great book of life; one imagines that somewhere there exists a book very much like this containing the names of every person who has done time in this world, which families they were born into, how many years they lived, the main good and bad deeds they did, and so on.

With Mr.Kuntia's permission I take a walk through the building, which is like taking a tour of the home of a joint family so vast that some of the members hardly know each other, though they live together in trust and fellowship. It is built in a traditional Indian style, three stories of rooms forming a square around a large central courtyard or aangan. Stacks of luggage spill out from the rooms onto the corridors; people are gathered on the edges of the courtyard and the steps of the staircases; here a widow in white is lighting a diya; there two children are holding a bottle under the common tank of drinking water. On the first floor I find four widows seated in a line against the wall of the corridor, their eyes carrying the vacancy of expectation and passivity characteristic of many old people. Today is Kartik Purnima, the last day of the month of Kartik; tomorrow they will leave the dharamshala and return to their homes in different villages. Perhaps next year they will be seen again in Puri.

By the time I leave the mansion darkness is falling; as I emerge onto the raised platform on which the building is set I see, rising slowly above the dharamshalas on the opposite side of the road, a bright full moon. Santosh must be setting up his stall in Cuttack; Rashmi Ranjan Das starting up the evening show at Laxmi Talkies; evening rituals must be beginning at the Jagannath temple and dozens of other temples; the figures on Puri beach must be turning into silhouettes, and smoke must be rising above Swargadwar. Life must be moving on.

Back soon, and Golshiri

I've been away for three weeks, travelling through Orissa and Madhya Pradesh, and haven't had much time for my blog, but I'll be back on Tuesday with a post about my days in the town of Puri in Orissa.

In the meantime, here's my review of the Iranian novelist Hushang Golshiri's novel The Prince in today's Scotland on Sunday. An edited version appears in the paper; my original piece is here:

The Prince
Hushang Golshiri (translated by James Buchan)
Harvill Secker, £ 12.00

In this stark, hallucinatory work the late Iranian novelist Hushang Golshiri, a leading figure of modern Persian prose, compresses the events of an entire era into a single night, showing us the nightmare world of an ailing prince, the last of a deposed dynasty, as he sits cloistered in his room at night surrounded by the photographs and the artifacts of his forebears.

Golshiri's Prince Ehtejab, like Lampedusa's Prince Fabrizio (The Prince first appeared in Persian in 1969, about a decade after The Leopard), is the representative of an order that no longer commands power, but he has none of the consolations of family, of the only slightly diminished respect of the world, or of astronomy that Prince Fabrizio possesses - his world is impoverished not just materially but morally, emotionally. He is peevish, whimsical, nervy, and something of a recluse. While his rapacious ancestors - 'Grandfather' and 'Father' in the narrative - murdered and pillaged at will, Prince Ehtejab has no taste for such things, but this does not redound entirely to his credit. He is something of a petty tyrant. Taunted about his weakness and impotence by his cool, sardonic wife Fakhronissa, he responds by taking on their servant-woman Fakhri as his mistress, inflicting upon her the arbitrary cruelty that is something of a family trait. After Fakhronissa dies, he insists that Fakhri impersonate her departed mistress.

"Prince Ehtejab was sunk in his armchair, his scalding forehead in both hands, coughing away. Once his maid had come upstairs, and once his wife." The novel's opening sentences show us the prince wracked by the fatal consumption that runs in his family, and also that there is no longer any boundary line between imagination and reality for him - his wife, we soon come to know, is dead. As he sits in the dark Prince Ehtejab's imagination conjures up scenes from the lives of his ancestors and his late wife; like Scrooge, he also sees his own childhood self pass before his eyes.One of the influences on Golshiri's work was the contemporary French nouveau roman of Robbe-Grillet and Claude Simon, works in which conventional character exposition and plot lines are abjured and the reader's sense of point of view and chronology muddied. In The Prince this narrative style is naturalised, as it were, by the delusionary mind of the protagonist.

But Golshiri also seeks other points of view. In one of the novel's most striking scenes, we see the plump, healthy Fakhri seated in front of the mirror trying to approximate, through dress and make-up, the frail, bony Fahkronissa. We hear the agitated burr of her thoughts, and see her, guilt-stricken, carrying on an imaginary dialogue with her late mistress - her world, too, has become disordered. She is not satisfied until she puts on Fakronissa's thick glasses which, even as they distort her vision, present to her something like the image of her mistress in the mirror. Glasses, photographs, mirrors: these abound in this novel of ghosts, visions and whispers.

Hitchcock in Hijab

My article about Iranian cinema, much of it based around films that played at the Asian Film Festival two weeks ago, appears in this week's Tehelka (issue dated November 12, 2005). It can be found online here.